Search The Register-Guard

archive

Business

Making math fun

A Eugene company creates a promising educational video game

By Sherri Buri McDonald

The Register-Guard

Appeared in print: Sunday, June 1, 2014, page D1

The first-graders in Christie Hoogendoorn’s class at Camas Ridge Elementary School in Eugene can hardly wait for a chance to play NumberShire, a new math video game. The game was jointly created by veteran computer game developers at Thought Cycle studio in Eugene and education experts at the University of Oregon’s Center on Teaching and Learning.

The kids rave about the web-based game, which teaches math through an engaging story and colorful characters set in the fairy tale village of NumberShire.

Nearly 1,000 students have been playing NumberShire at test schools in Oregon, Texas and Massachusetts.

“Very promising”

A small initial study of NumberShire, which has received funding through the U.S. Department of Education, showed that it can significantly improve students’ math skills. The Center on Teaching and Learning plans to do a larger-scale study across multiple states.

“All indications are there is something very promising here,” said Hank Fien, codirector of the Center on Teaching and Learning, which conducted the study and shares in the revenues NumberShire generates.

The study was independently evaluated by Oregon Research Institute, another Eugene-based research group with no financial stake in NumberShire.

Now the game’s developers want to spread the excitement NumberShire has sparked in Hoogendoorn’s classroom to more grade-schoolers around the country.

Realizing that schools are strapped for funding, NumberShire’s creators recently sent out a summer offer to 48,000 families across the country. For every NumberShire game families bought for $14.99, Thought Cycle would donate a copy of the game to the school of the family’s choice. If seven families at one school buy the game, Thought Cycle will donate a license to the school for an entire class of up to 30 students.

Families at Camas Ridge in Eugene and at La Pine Elementary School in La Pine, Oregon, already bought copies.

Seeing what NumberShire, along with her classroom math instruction, has enabled her students to do, Hoogendoorn predicts that more schools will want the game.

“I think it will take off because it’s linked to the Common Core State Standards,” she said. “It’s not replacing what we do as teachers; it complements it.”

Quality partnership

What makes NumberShire stand out from competing products is the strength of its partners, according to the game’s creators.

“We each brought something to it that we didn’t have on our own,” said Marshall Gause, president of Thought Cycle, who freely admits that he could not have created NumberShire without the Center on Teaching and Learning.

Gause has worked in the computer game industry for the past 15 years. He moved to Eugene from Austin in 2005 and worked as a creative director at local studio Buzz Monkey for six years before founding Thought Cycle in January 2011.

Thought Cycle brings to the joint venture a team of nine experienced game developers, who know how to design games that grab kids’ attention and make them want to keep playing.

“I have a strong eye for quality,” Gause said. “I felt that was really missing from the educational market.”

The 85-person Center on Teaching and Learning, an education research center founded in 2010, brings knowledge of the current education literature, which helped shape what NumberShire should teach and how it should teach it.

The center also brings research expertise and the ability to design rigorous studies to determine whether NumberShire actually helps kids learn.

There’s a lot of “junk, for lack of a better term, in the educational market,” Fien said, “and not many groups are even trying to investigate whether they’re improving student learning, and if they are, they’re using methods that aren’t rigorous enough to answer whether they’re improving outcomes or not.”

He views partnerships, such as the one with Thought Cycle, as a way to get more effective tools to teachers and students and to boost the local economy.

“Eugene is an interesting area where we have a lot of social scientists, and we also have this burgeoning education technology cluster here,” Fien said. “Combining those two things, the social scientists with these really high-end gamers and the edutech cluster, could be a really good economic thing for the community.”

He sees collaboration between the university, university research centers and local edutech groups, such as Thought Cycle, as a potential creator of good jobs, and “an opportunity for high-quality research, which is the lifeblood of the university,” Fien said.

“I’d like to see more partnerships that include the university, the research center and edutech companies like Thought Cycle,” he said.

A chance encounter

Thought Cycle linked up with the Center on Teaching and Learning because of a chance encounter between Gause and Fien. Gause was moving into Eugene’s Friendly Street area and he asked his new neighbor, Fien, if he would help him move a piano.

Over the next several years, the two neighbors got to know each other as they chatted on their commute to work by bus.

Eventually their parallel work universes collided, with the idea to collaborate on an educational video game.

They secured several grants through the Department of Education, including a $1.05 million Small Business Innovation Research to develop a version of NumberShire for the first grade and to rigorously test its effectiveness; a $1.5 million research grant to the UO to create a version for kindergarten, which is to be released this fall; and another $1.05 million SBIR grant for a version of NumberShire for the second grade, which is due out in early 2015.

Thought Cycle also is working on an iPad version of the game for first-graders to be released this summer, with versions for kindergartners and second-graders to follow, Gause said.

“It allows parents and kids to play on the go,” he said.

Next up, Thought Cycle wants to expand its partnership with the Center on Teaching and Learning to roll out some literacy products for the kindergarten to second-grade level, and literacy and humanities products for middle schoolers, Gause said.

“I’ve always had a passion to use the (video game) medium to teach,” he said. “I think it engages students in a lot of exciting ways. A lot of the issue with educational materials is to keep students engaged.”